And Time Stood Still, page 5
Then I was haunted by ‘if onlys’. Why had I not seen that he was so ill? Of course, I encountered the ‘experts’ who told me that they had noticed that he was not looking well for months! Why had I not noticed? Why had I not looked after him better? Why? Why? Why? And, of course, there was no answer to all this self-flagellation.
I would not have touched Con’s things for months, but the school wanted some of his papers because he normally prepared the timetable and the details were stored amongst his things. So, of necessity, the sorting-through began – but it was too soon. In all these things you need time. Going through someone’s possessions after their death is a crucifying exercise and before you begin you need time to heal.
Afterwards
His room
A book
The story
Of his life.
Each crevice
Filled to capacity,
A beehive
Of remembrances.
A collector
Of coins
Family history
Rare books
And stamps.
His room
As his life
A book of interest.
I turned back
The pages of his life
Back to his childhood
This man’s treasure
His love of little things
I walked on sacred ground
Back through his years.
Then my sister, Theresa, decided to visit her son who was living in Paris, and Gabriel, Ellen and I went with her. For me it proved not to be a good idea. The bereaved are better at home, I think. Many years previously at Listowel Writers’ Week, Brian McMahon had told me so: after the death of his wife he had gone to America and he had discovered that it had simply postponed the grieving and made it more difficult. He was right.
I walked around Paris in a haze of pain. On the evening of our arrival we took a boat trip down the Seine and I sat at the back so that the others would not see the tears streaming down my face. In normal circumstances a visit to the Musée d’Orsay to view the Impressionist paintings would have filled me with delight, but now these paintings simply swam in front of me.
All except one. I came upon a painting that stopped me in my tracks: it was of a lone, bowed figure struggling through a snow blizzard. It captured aloneness and misery. There I saw myself and in that instant the artist and I were on the same wavelength. Such is the power of creativity, be it art, music, or poetry, it can span ages and link people across decades and divides. I never forgot that painting.
Later in Notre Dame cathedral the powerful organ thundered out its crashing notes and drowned my sorrow in its intensity. There is something in powerful music that can temporarily seal off the anguish of the soul. I sat there and looked across at the opposite pew and saw a mother and daughter. I knew by their faces that they too were bereaved: the bereaved have faces haunted with sorrow.
The day we came back to Innishannon we opened the door to the smell of home cooking and a great fire warmed the seomra ciúin. Theresa’s daughter, Eileen, was there to welcome us home. I sat beside the fire and wept tears of relief to be home. This was the place to heal and put myself back together again.
For months after Con’s death I had a strange dream. I was sitting on the shore of a lake holding a rope that was attached to a boat on the water, and Con was sitting in the boat. Slowly, over the months, the dream faded and then came no more. Did it fade as I accepted the reality of Con’s death, I wondered?
Vacancy
He lived in the midst of us,
A quiet presence with a listening ear.
When he went an icy wind
Blew through the days
That he had filled with his kindness.
Brown Poultice
Easter Saturday
Still in the tomb,
Thorns embedded
In my mind.
On a hard hill
Outside the village
We planted trees.
Dug deep holes
In freezing sleet.
Back-breaking work.
But into the holes
Ran raw pain
That became absorbed
Into brown earth,
And the kind earth
Poulticed my wounds.
Chapter 7
A Man for All Seasons
You were unburnished gold
That polished warm
With the living years:
I had loved you
With a young girl’s
Delectable fancy,
But the wise-ing years
Revealed your inner depth.
Marriage is a bit like backing a horse in the Grand National: you can follow your hunches and study the odds, but you are half-way around the course before you know whether or not you have backed a winner. By then you have struggled over a few fences, cleared some and fallen at a few, and have tested your ability to rise and fall together. You have borne nights of exhaustion with crying babies, when heavy tiredness clings you to the bed. Both sets of parents have mingled and you have got to know your partner’s extended family, and you have seen how all parties blend together.
Becoming part of another family is like grafting a new rose onto original stock. Grafting is a delicate operation – some grafting enhances the original stock and some depletes it. When the combination is good, you finish up with a well-rooted, balanced tree, where new shoots have all-round support and can withstand subsequent life storms.
Initially, Gabriel’s adoptive mother, Aunty Peg, felt that I needed a bit of straightening out – and she was probably right, though I did not appreciate it at the time. However, his adoptive father, Uncle Jacky, thought that I was great, which, of course, endeared him to me from the beginning! Looking back now I realise that I was a bit of a prima donna, who was very taken up with appearances and with looking good. I also thought that Gabriel’s place was at my side as a kind of ‘permanent admirer’ and I would very likely have turned into what one of my friends terms a ‘grow-off-the-arm job’ – but Gabriel was having none of it. Being part of all parish activities meant that he was out most nights at meetings. At first I resented it. I wanted an extended fan club, but he needed a wife who could stand on her own two feet.
Clinging
Do not cling
To me
As ivy
To a tree,
Draining my strength,
Growing nothing
Of your own;
Stand tall and free,
Then we will grow
As two strong trees
Sheltering each other,
Our roots intertwining.
That first year was a learning curve for me and later I was very grateful to Gabriel that he had the moral fibre to withstand my emotional blackmail. To Uncle Jacky and Aunty Peg he was the golden boy, and my mother, when she got to know him, joined the admiration society. He was kind and broad-minded and welcomed all my family with open arms. They all thought that he was wonderful and one forthright sister assured me: ‘You were pure useless until you married Gabriel; he made a great job of you’ – a sentiment that I strenuously rejected but secretly knew contained an element of truth.
From Gabriel I learned that the greatest gift you can have in a marriage is freedom. He was generous and impulsive and when there was a quick decision to be made he never hesitated, whereas I am a bit of a ditherer.
However, he did have one big fault. He was a crazy driver and in today’s world would be tied to the kitchen table with a string of penalty points. He went to matches with tiers of young fellows, including some of our own, lining the boot and back seat. If Cork was beaten in the All-Ireland Final we scorched home in silence down the Naas dual carriageway at breakneck speed with my blood pressure registering as high as the car speedometer.
He loved challenges and we spent many years extending old buildings, and if I ever got a fanciful idea but considered it a half-risky prospect, he would sweep aside my reservations and encourage me to go for it. He would actually convince you that you were able to do anything.
Because you believed
I would light up your life
I did.
Because you believed
I could do anything
I did.
Because you think
I am filled with love
I am.
Because you think
I am beautiful
I am.
Because you know
I will walk on water
I will.
Because you know
I will reach for the stars
I will.
Love enabled me
To do the undoable
To reach the unreachable
To attain the unattainable.
It was the combination
That unlocked the vault
Hidden within.
When I took up writing he was unstinting in his support, never resenting the intrusion into his privacy, graciously receiving anyone who called, and was highly amused when he was referred to as Mr Taylor – we joked that when I came to live in the village I was known as ‘Gabriel’s wife’ and now he was ‘Mr Taylor’!
He worked long hours and was up very early every day to take in the post and morning papers. He was a great walker too, covering five or six miles daily. Because he loved Innishannon, he gave huge commitment to the Tidy Towns competition and often in the early hours before opening the shop, he went litter-picking around the village. When a bridge club was formed in the parish he took to it like a duck to water and played a few nights weekly.
But early one November morning all this activity crashed to a halt when, having got up to take in the papers, he collapsed on the shop floor. He was rushed to Cork University Hospital, and my sister, Ellen, and I accompanied him in the ambulance. But he never regained consciousness. For two days we sat with him, hoping and praying for a recovery while the family gathered from various locations – and then it was all over.
The room
Is cloaked in
After-death
Stillness.
He is gone into
Impenetrable
Sacred silence.
We are left
Standing
On the edge
Of a great mystery.
I would have liked to have brought Gabriel home with us to Innishannon immediately as we had done with our dear friend Con, but this was a different hospital with different procedures, so in the small hours of the morning we came back to Innishannon alone. We gathered around the seomra ciúin fire. It was time to cry, talk, and think about the funeral. Then to the funeral home to pick out a coffin where, due to shock and exhaustion, coffins swam before my eyes.
Later that morning we met the hearse at the old railway Viaduct on the Bandon road just west of the hospital and from there followed Gabriel home to the village. The boys took the coffin into the front room, where the lid was removed. He could have been sleeping peacefully. Laid out in his good grey suit, wearing his precious fáinne – for proficiency in the Irish language – his pioneer pin, indicating total abstinence, and his GAA Gaelic Athletic Association tie. All his life he had been a stalwart GAA man, and held every officership in the local and divisional clubs, and he had refereed all his life. Now, at the final whistle, he had left the pitch running.
All day friends and neighbours gathered and some took over the kitchen while a constant supply of cakes and other food came in the back door. Good neighbours formed a comforting support system around us. Gabriel had been a central part of this community and now they came and the story of his life was retold around his coffin in the replaying of matches and village stories. All his life he had run the village shop and post office and as a young fellow had delivered telegrams around the parish, so he knew every family and was familiar with every boreen. The old friends came from the four corners of the parish. He had also been the one to welcome the people in the new estates, so they too filtered in, at first reluctant in case they were intruding, as many were not familiar with the concept of a country wake. Over the years many of the young people of the parish had worked in the shop and they came, remembering his kindness and the fun they had as they experienced their first holiday job.
I felt that I was walking around in a bubble of unreality. It was as if I was outside myself watching someone else talking and shaking hands with people. A wake is full of sadness, but in an unexplainable way it helps and gives time for the reality of what has happened to soak into deep crevices of the mind. There is so much about death that is beyond human understanding that when it comes we are walking in the dark. It is of such enormity that it is almost too much for the mind to absorb; some part of us goes into auto pilot, but in the undercarriage of the mind another scene is playing itself out.
But we also need silence and time alone to absorb the enormity of what has happened. That night some of us went to bed for short sessions and the neighbours held vigil. The following day dragged on – and I did not want the evening to come because with it would come the final departure from the house. But come it did, and with it the final closing of the coffin.
After the rosary people filed out until only his family remained around Gabriel. My heart bled for Lena and the boys – their father had a huge capacity for loving and nobody would ever again love them as much as he had. When the undertaker put the lid on the coffin I felt that everything that had made my life worthwhile was under it.
The four boys shouldered the coffin out the door and along the street and then the Valley Rovers GAA members took him up the hill to the church. As the lit church came into view a strange peace came to me. Gabriel had loved this place and had come here to Mass every morning. He had worked hard for its recent restoration and now it was in pristine condition to receive him.
Then began the customary shaking of hands by everyone present, with the utterance of ‘Sorry for you troubles.’ I have always had slight reservations about this Irish practice because sometimes it seems a meaningless exercise, though when it comes with real feeling is a comfort. One young lad came and wordlessly gave my son, Mike, who was his team trainer, a strong hug; the boy was unable to articulate his feelings, but he wanted to bring comfort – and he did. Little things like that are a balm to frazzled minds.
Mass the following day was strangely beautiful and brought me comfort. Fr Pat was with us, but Fr Denis was in America and out of contact. During the Christmas of Con’s death Gabriel had given Pat a copy of Dineen’s Irish dictionary and taught him the prayers for Mass in Irish. Now Pat was here to say Mass in the language that Gabriel had loved so well. He gave an uplifting talk about the need to mourn and accept death, but also to link into the spiritual journey that Gabriel was now on. My niece, Treasa’s wonderful voice poured out a haunting rendering of the ‘Pie Jesu’. Its pathos filled the church and connected in a powerful way with the end of Gabriel’s life. It brought a realisation that the separation of the soul from the earthly body is a huge wrenching, beyond all human understanding. The piteous agony of the song captures the trauma of that deep suffering. It had until then been beyond my understanding. Deep sorrow opens gaps into unexpected moments of grace and beautiful church music calms the mind and connects us to unreachable realms.
As the church bell tolled, the coffin, escorted by members of his bridge club, was taken down to Uncle Jacky and Aunty Peg’s grave; as Gabriel was lowered into the earth I thought: the next coffin in there will be mine.
When the grave was covered Treasa led us all in singing Gabriel’s favourite song, ‘Carrigdhoun’. He loved that song and whenever we drove through the valley of Carrigdhoun he would break into it and at the same time, when the children were small, slow the car down so that they could see the white horse painted on a high rock there.
We returned to an overflowing house where the ‘kitchen staff’ had everything under control. It was a day of talk, crying and comforting, and if an observer had looked in the window it would have seemed like a big family get-together. But the heart of the family was gone and we had a long, hard road ahead of us.
The days after a funeral have to be endured to be understood; as Ellen was fond of saying, ‘You must walk in the shoes.’ I was so lucky to have my beloved sister with me then. We talked, baked and cried together. It is so good if you have someone on the same wavelength to walk with you on the grief road. But it has to be someone who is in total harmony with your soul. For some unknown reason I got the notion that I would take up knitting and in an unexplainable way I found that sitting by the warm fire, knitting, somehow eased my pain. What I knit was a mess, but that did not matter. In grief there is no anticipating what will help. On the advice of a friend who had walked the same road, every day I lit the fire in the seomra ciúin and sat beside it. In grief you are chilled to the marrow of your bone and the warmth of a fire helps thaw you out.
Christmas was fast approaching and I dreaded it. One night, while meandering around the quiet house, I opened a little-used press and found that Gabriel had all our Christmas presents hidden in there, wrapped up and ready. As well as that, he had always bought canvases for ‘Little Christmas’ – or ‘Women’s Christmas’, 6 January – for Ellen and myself, and they too were ready and lined up. It shook me to my foundations!
A few days before Christmas, while alone in the house, I decided to set up the crib. The lighting for the crib had always been Gabriel’s job as I am not an electrical whizz kid, but that night everything worked splendidly and as the crib took shape a sense of peace soaked into my being and I just knew that we would be all right for Christmas.
